Evolving Character of Urban Change in Prague Inner Neighborhoods: A New Face of Gentrification at Prague Letná?
Abstract
One of the key moments in current Prague inner city change are recent intensifying gentrification processes affecting particular neighborhoods in wider center of Prague (Žižkov, part of Vršovice, Karlín, Letná, Holešovice). Of course, we are aware of occurring or actively planned and started gentrification impulses at Vinohrady and Smíchov already in the 1990s.
The study undertaken approaches gentrification particularly in view of developers' crucial business and administrative complexes projects as they may be considered as an initial impulse for gentrification or, alternatively, contrary possible retreat from gentrification in the given neighborhood. With the help of comparative study, two ultimately contradicting situations, in view of gentrification processes, are distinguished.
The one at Smíchov resulting from ambitious revitalization on the base of putting up the entirely new business and shopping centrum of the neighborhood (the end of the 90's and the turn of the millennium) and the current situation at Letná - i.e. the neighborhood immediately facing realization of the new shopping/administrative center (or two) as a new dominant of this historical neighborhood. The cases may help us to distinguish differences in gentrification processes in immediately post-socialist period and, at the stage, that could be described as 'post-transitional'. - for the immediate post-socialist and later post-transitional contexts in two different eras